Pennsylvania is leading the way in expanding a savings program that families with rent subsidies can use to buy a home

Jozette Brown has wanted to buy a house for years.

Her two-bedroom apartment in West Philadelphia is too small for her and her daughters, 16 and 10. But building her savings has been a struggle. She constantly has to dip into them for bills or food and other things the family needs. And her oldest will be in college soon.

The 36-year-old now works two jobs — in nursing and with the Internal Revenue Service — and her government job promises regular raises. But since Brown’s rent is subsidized and tied to her income, any raise means that her rent goes up.

So to help her grow her savings and meet her long-term goals, Brown enrolled this summer in a program that puts the money she would pay in rent increases into a savings account. Her plan is to use that money to buy her first home within the next couple of years — “hopefully,” she said.

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The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency plans to start a $2 million pilot program in the first quarter of 2024 to work with private owners and operators of multifamily housing to enroll more tenants like Brown in the federal Family Self-Sufficiency Program.

The agency is the first of its kind nationally to devote funds to expanding the asset-building program beyond public housing, according to the National Council of State Housing Agencies, a professional trade organization for state housing finance agencies.

The federal program was created in 1990 to help households that receive housing assistance to increase their incomes and build up their savings to achieve goals such as paying for education or buying a house, which is a common aspiration for participants.

“This is a model that has been tried and tested, and we just want to apply best practices, create a new model, and expand it,” said Robin Wiessmann, executive director and chief executive officer of the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.

The federal program is typically associated with public housing. But in the last five years, it has expanded to include tenants like Brown who live in privately owned subsidized housing. And the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development last year began allowing private owners of subsidized multifamily properties to apply for federal grants to voluntarily provide the program to tenants.

The Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency has identified four mid- to large-sized private owners and operators of multifamily housing that are set to participate in the first round of the pilot. Wiessmann declined to identify them yet, but she said they have hundreds of units among them across the state, and households with subsidized rent will be automatically enrolled in the program.

Outside of this pilot, tenants have to opt in to the Family Self-Sufficiency Program, and few of them do, mainly because of skepticism and lack of awareness.

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The state agency’s $2 million fund will pay for program coordinators and required financial coaching for tenants in an effort to make participation as easy as possible for landlords. The agency is touting the program as another service they can provide to their tenants.

Stockton Williams, executive director of the National Council of State Housing Agencies, called the Family Self-Sufficiency Program “remarkably effective” for renters and said it “is just not nearly as well known even in the affordable housing industry as it should be.”

He said the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency’s fund is “a really exciting development toward the goal of broadening” the program.

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“The PHFA initiative is really the first time a housing finance agency has said, ‘Let’s go broader. Let’s take this proven program that has worked so well mostly for public housing residents and see how we can scale it in privately owned or nonprofit-owned housing,’” Williams said.

“It’s a part of a broader interest among state housing finance agencies in helping ensure the long-term success of renters in the properties they finance,” he said.

The National Council of State Housing Agencies hopes this initiative will inspire more affordable housing owners, landlords, and state agencies “to follow Pennsylvania’s lead,” Williams said.

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Brown, the West Philadelphia renter, lives at the Breslyn House Apartments, operated by the Boston-based WinnCompanies, a national affordable housing and mixed-income housing developer and management company.

In order to offer the program to its apartment residents living at Breslyn House and in the Carl Mackley Houses in Juniata Park, WinnCompanies works with partner Compass Working Capital, the national nonprofit financial services organization that runs the Family Self-Sufficiency Program for the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

WinnCompanies has applied for additional federal grants in hopes of adding its properties at the Cobbs Creek Apartments in West Philadelphia and the Awbury Park Apartments in East Germantown next year, said Trevor Samios, a senior vice president at the company who leads its “social impact” division, Connected Communities.

The company used its own funds to pay for the program at various properties before the federal government allowed it to apply for grants from the Department of Housing and Urban Development. It has 25 communities across the country that participate in the program and hopes to keep adding more.

“We’ve had folks buy homes. We’ve had folks save for college for their children, retire safely and stably. It’s an empowering program that’s centered on people driving their own goals forward,” Samios said. “It’s a mechanism that allows people to really, truly build savings, build wealth in an affordable housing system in this country that otherwise in many ways can perpetuate cyclical poverty.”

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Compass Working Capital, a Boston-based champion of the Family Self-Sufficiency Program, operates the program at 54 privately owned multifamily sites across 12 states.

“We would love to see more of this work happen in Pennsylvania,” said Markita Morris-Louis, chief executive officer of the organization and a board member at the Pennsylvania Housing Finance Agency.

Samios said JoAnn Hodges, one of WinnCompanies’ community coordinators is “our secret weapon of success” at Breslyn House, which began offering the program in July. Hodges has been able to use her long-standing relationships with residents and the trust she’s built with them to persuade tenants who are “just trying to make it” that the program can help them.

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“Some of them don’t know how they’re going to save any money when as soon as they’re getting paid, as soon as they see an [income] increase, it gets taken,” Hodges said. So they give the program a shot.

Hodges worked years ago as a property manager but said she likes her role in tenant support better.

“I’m no longer knocking on the door asking where’s their rent,” she said. “I feel like I’m someone who’s helping them to get ahead.”